Demands on pediatricians’ time are always growing. Under mounting pressure to document more while remaining fully present with patients and families, rapidly evolving AI technologies promise to help you spend less time inputting data and more time focused on care. They also raise important questions about security, privacy, and data ownership.
At PCC, we pay close attention to changes in our landscape, from advances in technology to trends in healthcare policy. We were as intrigued about ambient AI scribing as many of our clients were – but we knew that in order to do it right, we’d have to be patient. We announced our intent to introduce an integrated AI scribe solution in PCC EHR in July 2025, and now, just under a year of careful building and testing later, we’re proud to introduce PCC Scribe.
Many ambient scribes today operate primarily as web-based services. Clinicians log into a separate platform, record patient visits, and generate notes through an external system. In practical terms, this means two applications open on your workstation, recording a visit in the web application, then moving documentation back into the charting workflow. While many of these tools offer HIPAA compliance assurances, they often rely on storing visit data, transcripts, or draft notes on third-party infrastructure outside of the practice’s EHR ecosystem. Even when those systems advertise HIPAA compliance, practices may still have important questions about where patient data lives, how long it is retained, and whether it is used beyond the immediate clinical workflow. This can make it difficult to determine whether data is truly HIPAA-compliant.
PCC took a different approach.
“We wanted to make sure our clients’ data isn’t being unnecessarily exposed to systems that don’t need it,” says Brian LaClair, PCC’s lead AI developer.
Instead of building a separate cloud-focused product, we designed PCC Scribe to work directly within the EHR your practice already uses and trusts.
When a provider uses PCC Scribe during a visit, audio is processed through PCC-owned infrastructure. The system sends short audio segments for transcription and immediately returns text to the EHR workflow.
Critically, the audio itself is not permanently stored during this process.
LaClair explains that the audio handling exists only in temporary memory long enough to complete transcription, at clips of about 30 seconds. Once processed, the audio is discarded rather than written to long-term storage.
That design minimizes unnecessary exposure of protected health information while still allowing clinicians to benefit from ambient documentation technology.
PCC Scribe was intentionally designed to minimize retained data throughout the workflow.
The draft chart note generated during a visit is stored within your practice’s PCC EHR server – not in a separate third-party application or a remote cloud archive.
This means practices can continue relying on the same security they already use for their patient data inside PCC EHR.
For pediatricians, the workflow also feels familiar because PCC Scribe is fully integrated into the EHR experience rather than functioning as a separate application that requires copying and pasting between systems.
As LaClair explained, PCC wanted the experience to feel native to PCC EHR rather than “some random web app that you are copying and pasting back and forth.” This means fewer clicks, fewer mistakes, and an interface that already feels familiar.
See PCC Scribe in action:
PCC Scribe uses a third-party large language model (LLM) provider to generate clinical draft notes from transcribed visit information. PCC currently works with Google’s enterprise AI infrastructure for this process.
However, LaClair emphasized that the partnership includes strict HIPAA protections and a Business Associate Agreement (BAA) designed to safeguard patient information.
The agreement includes:
In practical terms, that means information sent for note generation is not retained or reused to further train the underlying AI models.
LaClair also noted that PCC intentionally designed the architecture to remain flexible. If another provider better meets PCC’s security and operational standards in the future, the underlying system can adapt without changing PCC’s core privacy requirements. What does that mean for your practice? The best standards for security available, always.
Before releasing PCC Scribe, PCC conducted extensive prototyping and testing to validate both usability and workflow integration. We worked closely with pilot practices to refine how PCC Scribe functions in real clinical workflows.Over months of development, PCC and our amazing pilot users helped shape:
“The biggest part of development was getting how we made it fully integrated right,” said LaClair. “We consulted with many, many clients and specifically physicians over the course of eight months of development.”
The goal wasn’t simply to add AI functionality to follow a market trend. It was to create an experience that feels natural inside PCC EHR while maintaining the security standards practices expect from PCC.
One important theme throughout PCC’s development process was the ability for clinicians to maintain control over their notes.
Draft notes remain editable before import into the patient chart, and clinicians can refine templates and workflows to match their preferred documentation style.
According to LaClair, practices that thoughtfully configure their Scribe templates often see the best results, because the generated notes better reflect how they already document care.
Just like the EHR, PCC Scribe is designed to support the way you want to practice medicine.
Ambient AI tools are quickly becoming part of modern clinical workflows. But for pediatric practices handling sensitive patient data, convenience alone is not enough. PCC has always valued delivering reliable, trustworthy services to our clients that serve the way independent practices deliver healthcare. We’re proud of the way we built PCC Scribe because just like for our clients, trust is the foundation of quality care.
By keeping data handling tightly integrated with PCC EHR and minimizing unnecessary data retention, PCC aims to give practices the benefits of ambient documentation without compromising on security.
While PCC encourages transparent, consent-based use of the PCC Scribe, the legal obligation to obtain patient and parental consent to record conversations depends on your local jurisdiction. Check with your practice’s legal counsel to establish policies and practices for use of the Scribe.
Ready to learn more about PCC Scribe? Check out our documentation on PCC Learn. PCC Scribe is completely optional for PCC EHR users and can be enabled for a fee. You can also sign up for either of our informational weblabs on May 28th and June 24th by visiting pcc.com/events. The content for each weblab is the same, so sign up for the time that is most convenient for you!